It was the first game in the newly restarted Williams Electronics coin-op division, and features their notable use of digitized graphics (later made famous in games such as Mortal Kombat). In fact, the quality of the graphics in terms of number of colors would not be surpassed until the game Mortal Kombat II (released in 1993). The game features what in arcade terminology is termed a medium resolution monitor – higher resolution than televisions and normal arcade monitors, although often in a smaller physical size. NARC was also the very first arcade game to utilize the TI TMS34010, which is a 32-bit processor. The game was also notable for the numerous voice samples used during and between levels.

The game’s main characters are Max Force and Hit Man, who have received a memo from Spencer Williams, Narcotics Opposition Chairman in Washington, DC dispatching them on Project NARC. Their mission is to apprehend Mr. Big, head of an underground drug trafficking and terrorist organization.

The player controls either Max Force or Hit Man, who are mowing down junkies, drug dealers and organized crime kingpins. Max and Hit are equipped with an automatic weapon and missile launcher. When an enemy is dispatched using the latter, they explode in a torrent of scorched and bloody body appendages. Some enemies can be arrested after they surrender and then float away with “BUSTED” over them, this is then added to a tally at the end of the level along with drugs and money confiscated from other enemies that they dropped when killed (the game actually awards more points at the end of a round for arresting enemies without killing them). The game’s objective is to reach and destroy various drug dealing ringleaders.

Rock group Pixies recorded a cover of the theme song from the original arcade game, originally written by game music composer Brian L. Schmidt, and released it as a B-Side to their 1991 single, “Planet of Sound“. They titled the cover “Theme From NARC”, and it consisted of frontmanBlack Francis singing the song title several times, while the band played the theme music. The song is also included on their Complete ‘B’ Sides compilation album.

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“You can’t go to Disney without a tour concierge,’’ she sniffed. “This is how the 1 percent does Disney.” The woman said she hired a Dream Tours guide to escort her, her husband and their 1-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter through the park in a motorized scooter with a “handicapped” sign on it. The group was sent straight to an auxiliary entrance at the front of each attraction.

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Nigerian police say they have rescued six pregnant girls from child traffickers who were planning to sell their babies. Two men and a woman have been arrested in the case, which is the second so-called baby factory to be uncovered in a week. Last week, at least 23 girls and four babies were found in Umuaka, in eastern Nigeria’s Imo State.

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This little known story has met a just conclusion, as Sophia Stewart, African American author of The Matrix will finally receive her just due from the copyright infringement of her original work!!! A six-year dispute has ended involving Sophia Stewart, the Wachowski Brothers, Joel Silver and Warner Brothers. Stewart’s allegations, involving copyright infringement and racketeering, were received and acknowledged by the Central District of California, Judge Margaret Morrow presiding. Stewart, a New Yorker who has resided in Salt Lake City for the past five years, will recover damages from the films, The Matrix I, II and III, as well as The Terminator and its sequels. She will soon receive one of the biggest payoffs in the history of Hollywood , as the gross receipts of both films and their sequels total over 2.5 billion dollars.

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Wireless operators have access to an unprecedented volume of information about users’ real-world activities, but for years these massive data troves were put to little use other than for internal planning and marketing. This data is under lock and key no more. Under pressure to seek new revenue streams (see “AT&T Looks to Outside Developers for Innovation”), a growing number of mobile carriers are now carefully mining, packaging, and repurposing their subscriber data to create powerful statistics about how people are moving about in the real world.

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A British judge on Thursday sentenced a businessman who sold fake bomb detectors to 10 years in jail, saying the millionaire had shown a cavalier disregard for potentially fatal consequences. James McCormick made an estimated 50 million pounds ($77.8 million) from the sales of his non-working detectors – which were based on a novelty golf ball finder – to countries including Iraq, Belgium, Niger and Saudi Arabia. McCormick, 57, was convicted of three counts of fraud last month and sentenced Thursday at the Old Bailey court in London, where Judge Richard Hone called his profits from a “callous confidence trick” obscene and outrageous.

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United Nations Twitter Account Follows Porn Star

The official United Nations Twitter account has 1,462,609 followers (or it did at the time this article was published) and only follows 537 accounts – a pretty exclusive club to say the least. For the most part, the 537 accounts @UN follows include world governments, dozens of UN special missions and international heads of states. Buried within that list, however, ConstitutionSchool.com was shocked to discover one account which seemed oddly out of place: “Penelope Black Diamond,” a German porn star whose Twitter username is @BigBustyStar.

‘So, rather surprisingly, we can say that life on earth 1,900 million years ago would have smelled a lot like rotten eggs.’

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It’s no secret that we’re monitored continuously on the Internet. Some of the company names you know, such as Google and Facebook. Others hide in the background as you move about the Internet. There are browser plugins that show you who is tracking you. One Atlantic editor found 105 companies tracking him during one 36-hour period. Add data from your cell phone (who you talk to, your location), your credit cards (what you buy, from whom you buy it), and the dozens of other times you interact with a computer daily, we live in a surveillance state beyond the dreams of Orwell. It’s all corporate data, compiled and correlated, bought and sold. And increasingly, the government is doing the buying. Some of this is collected using National Security Letters (NSLs). These give the government the ability to demand an enormous amount of personal data about people for very speculative reasons, with neither probable cause nor judicial oversight. Data on these secretive orders is obviously scant,

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Dr Nitzan said: ‘All of the patients developed psychotic symptoms related to the situation, including delusions regarding the person behind the screen and their connection through the computer. ‘Two patients began to feel vulnerable as a result of sharing private information, and one even experienced tactile hallucinations, believing that the person beyond the screen was physically touching her. ‘Some of the problematic features of the internet relate to issues of geographical and spatial distortion, the absence of non-verbal cues, and the tendency to idealise the person with whom someone is communicating, becoming intimate without ever meeting face-to-face.’ He added that mental health professionals should not overlook the internet’s influence when speaking to patients. ‘When you ask somebody about their social life, it’s very sensible to ask about Facebook and social networking habits, as well as internet use.

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The State Department of the United States recently released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2012, posing as “the world judge of human rights” again. As in previous years, the reports are full of carping and irresponsible remarks on the human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions including China. However, the U.S. turned a blind eye to its own woeful human rights situation and never said a word about it. Facts show that there are serious human rights problems in the U.S. which incur extensive criticism in the world. The Human Rights Record of the U.S. in 2012 is hereby prepared to reveal the true human rights situation of the U.S. to people across the world by simply laying down some facts.

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A hidden epidemic is poisoning America. The toxins are in the air we breathe and the water we drink, in the walls of our homes and the furniture within them. We can’t escape it in our cars. It’s in cities and suburbs. It afflicts rich and poor, young and old. And there’s a reason why you’ve never read about it in the newspaper or seen a report on the nightly news: it has no name — and no antidote. The culprit behind this silent killer is lead. And vinyl. And formaldehyde. And asbestos. And Bisphenol A. And polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). And thousands more innovations brought to us by the industries that once promised “better living through chemistry,” but instead produced a toxic stew that has made every American a guinea pig and has turned the United States into one grand unnatural experiment.

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In 1907, six different villages were built in the Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale, representing all the corners of the French colonial empire at the time– Madagascar, Indochine, Sudan, Congo, Tunisia and Morocco. The villages and their pavillions were built to recreate the life and culture as it was in their original habitats. This included mimicking the architecture, importing the agriculture and appallingly, inhabiting the replica houses with people, brought to Paris from the faraway territories.

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It’s been dubbed the most expensive prison on Earth and President Barack Obama cited the cost this week as one of many reasons to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which burns through some $900,000 per prisoner annually. The Pentagon estimates it spends about $150 million each year to operate the prison and military court system at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, which was set up 11 years ago to house foreign terrorism suspects. With 166 inmates currently in custody, that amounts to an annual cost of $903,614 per prisoner. By comparison, super-maximum security prisons in the United States spend about $60,000 to $70,000 at most to house their inmates, analysts say. And the average cost across all federal prisons is about $30,000, they say.

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And in the response to Supreme, he argued that McSweeney had been putting out Supreme Bitch shirts since 2004, when she was 22. Nine years later, Jebbia and Supreme have attempted to sue her for millions of dollars, arguing copyright infringement against the brand. A brand that, by the way, has definitely incorporated other people and other companies’ design elements itself. One of those people? American conceptual artist Barbara Kruger, whose work explicitly inspired not just Supreme’s ubiquitous red-and-white logo (see above), but so many other brands like it, and legions of other fairly famous artists as well. But in the past, Kruger—who now teaches at UCLA—has been pretty quiet on the connections, deferring questions about the commercial entrepreneurs who’ve culled from and profited off of the template she inarguably set. But we thought we’d give it a shot, and Complex reached out to Kruger anyway, asking her what she made of the lawsuit, as well as both McSweeney and Jebbia’s p

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When it comes to sex, Germans are not known for being squeamish. Yet a sex-education book that has been circulating in Berlin elementary schools has some parents up in arms. The book, “Where Do You Come From?” (“Wo kommst du her?”), which is recommended for ages 5 and up, shows a couple, Lisa and Lars, in various stages of arousal. In one illustration, Lisa puts a condom on Lars’ erect penis. Another shows them having intercourse. The text also veers toward the explicit. “When it’s so good that it can’t get any better, Lisa and Lars have an orgasm,” it reads. And, finally: “The vagina and penis feel nice and tingly and warm.”

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“We wanted to give people a sense of not only where to put their sexual organs, but where to put their arms and legs,” Ribner says. “If you have never seen a movie, never read a book, how are you supposed to know what you do?”

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By adding all those sub-categories up, imperfect as they may be, it’s clear that the rate of reported overdoses the U.S. more than doubled between 1999 and 2010. About half of those additional deaths are in the pharmaceuticals category, which the CDC has written about before. Nearly three-quarters of the pharmaceuticals deaths are opioid analgesics—prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin. And while cocaine, heroin and alcohol are all responsible for enough deaths to warrant their own stripes on the chart, many popular illegal drugs—including marijuana and LSD—are such a tiny blip as to be invisible.

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“The baby was naked. They strapped tape around her mouth to keep her from screaming. Then they placed her on a board. After calling on the spirits they threw her on the bonfire alive,” said Miguel Ampuero, of the Police investigative Unit, Chile’s equivalent of the FBI. Authorities said the 12-member sect was formed in 2005 and was led by Ramon Gustavo Castillo Gaete, 36, who remains at large. “Everyone in this sect was a professional,” Ampuero said. “We have someone who was a veterinarian and who worked as a flight attendant, we have a filmmaker, a draftsman. Everyone has a university degree. ” Police said Castillo Gaete, the ringleader, was last seen traveling to Peru to buy ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew plant that he used to control the members of the rite.

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SO, the bottom line is this: If you are in a place where you hear steady, and sustained, and nearby (lets call that, for some technical reasons, anything less than 800 meters) gunfire, do these things: Go to your basement. You are cool there. If you don’t have a basement, go to the other side of the house from the firing, and leave, heading away from the firing. Do not stop for a mile. If you do not think that you can leave, get on the ground floor, as far from the firing as possible, and place something solid between you and the firing. Solid is something like a bathtub, a car (engine block), a couple of concrete walls (single layer brick…nope). If you are high up (say 4rd story or higher) just get away from the side of the building where the firing is taking place. You will, mostly, be protected by the thick concrete of the structure. 8. But for cripes sake, do not step out on to your front porch and start recording a video on your iPhone, unless you actually have a death-wish

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“Terrorists want media attention, so we give it to them. Unsafe industries don’t want media attention–so we give that to them.” And that’s exactly what’s going on today, in the coverage of the two disasters last week.

5000 people at 4-20 for UCSC. This guy had a booth set up to unveil this guy, shouldn’t have drawn so much attention man!

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“the ringleader of it all, according to the indictment, is Tavon White, a four-year inmate charged with attempted murder. He reportedly made $16,000 in one month off the smuggled contraband. Four corrections officers–Jennifer Owens, Katera Stevenson, Chania Brooks and Tiffany Linder, who are also facing charges — allegedly became impregnated by White since he’s been in jail. Charging documents reveal Owens had ‘Tavon’ tattooed on her neck and Stevenson had ‘Tavon’ tattooed on her wrist.”

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All Planet Infowars Users that are participating in the Dating Freedom Lovers Mission.

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In its report, Elaph said several religious cops deployed through the festival rushed into the UAE pavilion on Sunday and escorted three Emirati delegates out. “A festival official said the three Emiratis were taken out on the grounds they are too handsome and that the Commission members feared female visitors could fall for them,” the news service said, adding that the festival’s management took urgent measures to deport the three to Abu Dhabi.

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Hundreds of poor people waiting outside of a closed grocery store for the possibility of getting the remaining food is not the picture of the “American Dream.” Yet on March 23, outside the Laney Walker Supermarket in Augusta, Ga., that is exactly what happened. Residents filled the parking lot with bags and baskets hoping to get some of the baby food, canned goods, noodles and other non-perishables. But a local church never came to pick up the food, as the store owner prior to the eviction said they had arranged. By the time the people showed up for the food, what was left inside the premises—as with any eviction—came into the ownership of the property holder, SunTrust Bank. The bank ordered the food to be loaded into dumpsters and hauled to a landfill instead of distributed. The people that gathered had to be restrained by police as they saw perfectly good food destroyed. Local Sheriff Richard Roundtree told the news “a potential for a riot was extremely high.”

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10 Biggest Unsolved U.S. Terrorism Cases

1 Wall Street Bombing (September 16,1920) – New York, New York 38 dead, 143 wounded The detonation of a horse-drawn wagon loaded with 45kg of dynamite and more than 200kg of scrap iron in front of the J.P. Morgan offices in New York remains the deadliest unsolved terrorist incident in U.S. history. Federal agents investigated, and dismissed, the possibility of involvement by Soviet saboteurs, the Communist Party USA and the Industrial Workers of the World. Historians believe the bombing may have been engineered by Italian anarchists.

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It’s been known for decades that animals such as chimpanzees seek out medicinal herbs to treat their diseases. But in recent years, the list of animal pharmacists has grown much longer, and it now appears that the practice of animal self-medication is a lot more widespread than previously thought, according to a University of Michigan ecologist and his colleagues.

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“Originally, the dung-covered beans were collected in coffee plantations but more recently, as more people wanted to drink coffee made from beans that had passed through the intestines of this small carnivore, entrepreneurs have begun sticking civets in cages, feeding them coffee beans and recollecting them from the dung for wholesale,” the paper’s author, Chris Shepherd the deputy regional director with anti-wildlife crime NGO TRAFFIC, told mongabay.com. “Reportedly, as demand rose, other civet species were captured and added to these captive civet coffee makers.”

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Police almost never talk about or claim credit for making the arrests. Police make so many because they are easy arrests and because significant constituencies within police departments benefit from the arrests. Police work can be dangerous. Ordinary patrol and narcotics police like the marijuana arrests because they are relatively safe and easy. If an officer stops and searches 10 or 15 young people, one or two of them will likely have a bit of marijuana. All police have arrest quotas and often they can earn much-desired overtime pay by making a marijuana arrest toward the end of a shift. In New York City, arresting people for petty offenses for overtime pay is called “collars for dollars.” Every cop in the city knows that expression. From the officers’ point of view, people possessing marijuana are highly desirable arrestees. As one veteran lieutenant said, people whose only crime is marijuana possession are “clean,” meaning physically clean. Unlike junkies or winos

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In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

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“Super Mario groped the woman,” says Times Square Alliance president Tim Tompkins. “Elmo was ranting anti-Semitic things. Spider-Man punched a woman in the face. Now a kid was attacked by Cookie Monster. And those are just ones where there’s been an arrest! We’ve anecdotally heard there’s a lot more that’s been happening. One of my staff members said an Elmo patted her backside when she was walking through Times Square on a crowded day.” Tompkins also pointed us to a photo of a man dressed as Toy Story’s Woody urinating in a doorway

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BOOTY-OBSESSED Barbie Edwards has spent a fortune on food to get such a huge backside — but now her big butt is making big bucks. The 42-year-old mum claims she has the world’s largest bottom, and says she has used her unique asset to make a whopping £18,000 in the past six months just by BALANCING things on her behind. The colossal rear measures creating a “butt shelf” upon which Barbie can balance trays of food and drink — to the delight of her paying fans. The bouncy blonde is delighted with her shape and is now hoping to persuade Guinness World Records to include a new category for world’s biggest shelf behind. She said: “I used to hate my big hips and bum, but since I’ve been modelling it’s changed the way I feel about myself. My bum shelf has a career all of its own and I wouldn’t change it.”

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So the very bill that Obama last year claimed was “a good first step” and suggested that “we should do even more in the months ahead”, has now been totally revised and stripped of the most important aspects which promote transparency in the new bill that he has just signed yesterday. Instead of doing more to increase transparency, Congress and President Obama have rolled back the very provisions of the bill which helped promote an open government, in a decidedly non-transparent manner (unanimous voice consent, closed-signing by the president).

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The Hocking County Sheriff’s office is trying to get to the bottom of who is responsible for drugging Laurelville Police Chief Mike Berkemeier. Berkemeier says the problem began Easter Sunday when he ate some cake sitting on his kitchen counter. ”I got up in the morning and ate it — the entire thing,” he said. Shortly after eating that cake, Berkemeier says he began to feel sick like never before. ”I thought I was dying,” he said. Berkemeier says all he could think to do was make the short drive from his home to the Laurelville police station for help. ”I don’t remember much of the drive here, even though it’s just a few blocks and was met by a couple of the medics from the fire department,” he said. Berkemeier tells 10TV medics transported him to Berger Hospital in Circleville where doctors performed tests to see what was wrong with him. ”I kept trying to explain to them this wasn’t getting any better. It just got worse,” he said. “I felt like I was out of my mind.”

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Hijacking airplanes with an Android phone

It’s amazing to discover that aviation – an industry where safety is of vital importance and every physical element has one or even two fail-safe mechanisms – is failing to secure the onboard computer, the heart and brain of the plane.

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There is a national crisis of federal employees engaged in the child porn industry and a related epidemic at the state level. I’ve documented two states, Vermont and Maine, that appear to be running state protected child trafficking rings with evidence of cops, judges, lawyers, clergy and government employees covering for each other. This kind of racketeering creates powerful, and extremely profitable, pedophile rings. Money drives the crime. It is estimated that a criminal willing to molest a child in front of a live webcam can earn $1,000 a night. In Kittery Maine, at the “Danish Health Club,” one bust yielded $6.1 million in “door fees” over a five year period with “prostitutes” earning $12 million. Pimps’ earnings were not reported. The “door man” was a retired police officer whose wife worked in back. This bust happened because of one hard-working IRS agent, Rod Giguere.

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So if THC levels are generally high across the board and the other cannabinoids are present only at trace levels, what makes one strain different from another? And why does each marijuana strain impart a distinct psychoactive effect? There must be something else in the plant that influences the quality of the cannabis high. David Watson, the master crafter of the foundational hybrid Skunk #1, was among the first to emphasize the importance of aromatic terpenes for their modifying impact on THC. Terpenes, or terpenoids, are the compounds in cannabis that give the plant its unique smell. THC and the other cannabinoids have no odor, so marijuana’s compelling fragrance depends on which terpenes predominate. It’s the combination of terpenoids and THC that endows each strain with a specific psychoactive flavor.

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Everyone knows the IRS is our nation’s tax collector, but it is also a law enforcement organization tasked with investigating criminal violations of the tax laws. New documents released to the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the IRS Criminal Tax Division has long taken the position that the IRS can read your emails without a warrant—a practice that one appeals court has said violates the Fourth Amendment (and we think most Americans would agree).

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The discovery of a hidden camera may help solve a series of break-ins at upscale homes in several North Texas cities. “This one has already been camouflaged,” said detective Ben Singleton, holding what looks like a piece of bark that would go unnoticed in most yards. It’s actually a video camera not much bigger than a matchbox, and it’s activated by a motion detector. Such cameras turned up in March planted outside several upscale homes in Dalworthington Gardens. “I’ve never seen anything like this. And most detectives in this area haven’t,” Singleton said. Earlier this month, John Anton discovered the first one near his driveway. “I had no idea what it was,” Anton said. “Very strange.” He took the device to Dalworthington Gardens police. “We tore one of these apart to figure out what it was all about,” Singleton said. The detective said it turned out to be surveillance for a long-running, sophisticated burglary scheme. But at first, police feared it might even be a kidnapping plot to

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Elites tend to believe in a venal, selfish, and essentially monstrous version of human nature, which I sometimes think is their own human nature. I mean, people don’t become incredibly wealthy and powerful by being angelic, necessarily. They believe that only their power keeps the rest of us in line and that when it somehow shrinks away, our seething violence will rise to the surface—that was very clear in Katrina. Timothy Garton Ash and Maureen Dowd and all these other people immediately jumped on the bandwagon and started writing commentaries based on the assumption that the rumors of mass violence during Katrina were true. A lot of people have never understood that the rumors were dispelled and that those things didn’t actually happen; it’s tragic.

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The annual Drug & Alcohol Testing Industry Association (DATIA) conference, held in 2012 in San Antonio, Texas, looks like any other industry gathering. The 600 or so attendees sip their complimentary Starbucks coffee, munch on small plates of muffins and fresh fruit, and backslap old acquaintances as they file into a sprawling Marriott hotel conference hall. They will hear a keynote address by Robert DuPont, who served as drug policy director under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Nothing odd about any of this until you consider that the main subject of the conference is urine.

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Once banned from the world of mainstream comic books by the infamous Comics Code Authority, LGBT characters now have a stronger presence in the world of superhero comics than ever before, with gay and lesbian heroes like Batwoman, Northstar and Green Lantern Alan Scott openly declaring who they are — and even getting married. Today, DC Comics told Wired that it will continue to expand the LGBT diversity of its superhero universe by introducing the first openly transgender character in a mainstream superhero comic.

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A remarkable thing happened in 2008: drug overdose surpassed auto fatalities as the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. Public health officials declared an epidemic, and communities united to battle this new enemy that had left a staggering body count in its wake. The people had a weapon, naloxone, an antidote that reverses opiate overdose, and programs began popping up across the country to provide training and free naloxone to people at risk for overdose. But then Big Pharma stepped in. The same year that naloxone became so critical to saving lives, one pharmaceutical company secured a monopoly on its production and jacked up the prices by 1,100%.

Bet you didn’t think you needed semen pills.

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Riot Toys

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A blackout disabled cooling at four fuel pools last month, an event the company traced to a rat that might have gnawed on power cables and caused a short circuit. Engineers found its scorched body in a damaged switchboard. Tepco has since installed mousetraps at the site and promised to plug holes through which rats and other rodents might enter buildings and gnaw on important equipment. It has also promised to speed up work to install backup power cables to the fuel pools. But Friday afternoon, four workers using wire meshing to seal a space around electric cables caused a ground fault, or the accidental flow of current to the ground. No one was injured, but the ground fault shut off electricity to the cooling system at the No. 3 reactor fuel pool. “We were installing wire nets to keep the rats out. But the end of one of the wires may have momentarily come into contact with a live terminal,” said Masayuki Ono, general manager at Tepco’s Nuclear Power and Plant Siting Division. “…

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People seem to have a love-hate relationship with dogs dressed up like humans, but that hasn’t stopped the Internet from churning out more ridiculous memes. The latest installment: Dogs wearing pantyhose (OK, we’re classing it up a bit, Dis Magazine called it “bitches wearing pantyhose”) is a trend picking up in China, according to Sharp Daily, a Hong Kong news site.

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At the height of his use, the man – known as “Mr A” – was taking 25 tablets a day, Psychosomatics journal revealed. The 37-year-old still had trouble with short-term memory problems seven years after he stopped taking the drug. Doctors at St George’s Hospital, London said Mr A’s case was extreme, but showed ecstasy’s long-term effects. It is possible to become psychologically dependent on the feelings associated with ecstasy but heavy daily use is extremely rare and it is not thought that people can become physically dependent Martin Barnes, DrugScope The doctors said it was the largest reported ecstasy lifetime consumption by one person, the previous being around 2,000 tablets. Writing in Psychosomatics, they say Mr A reported he had used ecstasy between the ages of 21 and 30. For two years, he took five tablets every weekend, rising to an average of 3.5 tablets per day for the next three years, then soaring to 25 tablets a day over the next four years.

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Did you know that there are thousands upon thousands of homeless people that are living underground beneath the streets of major U.S. cities? It is happening in Las Vegas, it is happening in New York City and it is even happening in Kansas City. As the economy crumbles, poverty in the United States isabsolutely exploding and so is homelessness. In addition to the thousands of “tunnel people” living under the streets of America, there are also thousands that are living in tent cities, there are tens of thousands that are living in their vehicles and there are more than a million public school children that do not have a home to go back to at night. The federal government tells us that the recession “is over” and that “things are getting better”, and yet poverty and homelessness in this country continue to rise with no end in sight. So what in the world are things going to look like when the next economic crisis hits?

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Amsterdam is to create “Scum villages” where nuisance neighbours and anti-social tenants will be exiled from the city and rehoused in caravans or containers with “minimal services” under constant police supervision.

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America won’t be repeating that historic one small step anytime soon — not according to NASA chief Charlie Bolden, anyway. “NASA is not going to the Moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime,” Bolden told a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board in Washington last week

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As many of you may know, and may have heard in the news recently, many of my sermons have deviated from traditional Christian doctrine. I have been accused of altering the ‘message’ to fit my own doctrine and dogma. Others have accused me of preaching ‘feel good Christianity’. I have also been accused of profiting greatly from my ministry, with my books and television deals. Many of their criticisms are legitimate. What they don’t know is that deep down in my heart, for a number of years now, I have been questioning the faith, Christianity and whether Jesus Christ is really my, or anyone’s, ‘savior’. I believe now that the Bible is a fallible, flawed, highly inconsistent history book that has been altered hundreds of times. There is zero evidence the Bible is the holy word of God. In fact, there is zero evidence “God” even exists. No God worth believing in is going to send you to Hell for not believing in him. Not even the worst sinner and scum of the Earth deserves eternal torment

Within the Primal/paleo community and elsewhere, it’s often stated offhandedly that wheat is addictive. And absolutely, wheat for many people feels like something they could never give up. I hear it all the time: “I couldn’t live without bread.” “What would I do without cereal, dinner rolls, toast, {insert your favorite grain-based food item here}.” And wheat is often the main culprit in the sugar/insulin rollercoaster that drives sugar-burners’ need to eat (more wheat) every few waking hours. But is wheat addictive in a different sense – as an opiate like heroin and other drugs? Today I take a look at the research and attempt to separate fact from fiction. What do we really know about wheat as an opiate?

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A pair of plainclothes officers arrived at New Edition Cleaners at 4929 Broadway at 11 a.m. Tuesday, armed with buckets of black paint, rollerbrushes and drop cloths, and began painting over local graffiti artist Alan Ket’s five-day-old mural titled “Murderers.” The two identified themselves as police to a reporter. The mural, which included the word “murderers” painted above several tombstones and coffins with epitaph names that included the NYPD, the Environmental Protection Agency and global corporations including Halliburton and Monsanto, was painted on the wall of the business with the permission of its owners. Officers visited the store on Monday, telling owners that the painting needed to come down and calling the message a “bad idea.” “I can’t confront them, because I don’t want problems,” New Edition Cleaners owner Marina Curet, who has owned the business for five years, said in Spanish. “There is no freedom of expression.

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These links between sports medicine journals and the sports drinks industry may help to explain a characteristic of the sports drinks literature that is familiar to those who have analysed drug trials over the past 30 years—the relative (or almost complete) absence of negative studies.

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What the hell IS that thing? A bloated, pig-like carcass spotted beneath the Brooklyn Bridge over the weekend has spooked New Yorkers buzzing about mutant river “monsters.” Photographer Denise Ginley shot pics of the rotting, sand-covered corpse on Sunday. “My boyfriend and I were walking along the East River on our way to a farmer’s market when we spotted it among some driftwood on a small stretch of sand below the Brooklyn Bridge that you can barely call a beach,” she emailed the Daily News.

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Domino’s worker Jose Reyes told police that he was delivering a pizza around 9 PM when he was approached by two men, one of whom threatened to shoot Reyes if he did not “give him the money and pizza.” Reyes said he handed over $20, his HTC cell phone, and the pizza. Hamer, seen in the adjacent mug shot, told investigators that he “participated as a look out and provided protection for the other male during the robbery.” Cops noted, “Hamer received three slices of Pizza for his participation in this robbery.”

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Four people walking or playing on New York City beaches have suffered puncture wounds from needles in the sand in the last three weeks, park officials said. In the most recent incident, a lifeguard on duty at Rockaway Beach stepped on a needle at Beach 139th Street Tuesday afternoon, officials said. The other three people were wounded over the last three weeks on Staten Island. On July 16, a 63-year-old woman stepped on a hypodermic needle on Cedar Grove Beach, cutting her foot. On July 14, a 37-year-old man was stuck in the hand by a needle while he was on the sand at South Beach, near Father Capodanno Boulevard and Sand Lane. And on July 4, a 40-year-old man was stuck by a needle at South Beach. All three beachgoers were taken to Staten Island University Hospital North. “You don’t know where these needles come from,” said Crystal Matis of Elm Park, who was at the beach Wednesday with her young daughter. “It’s very scary.”

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Villagers in Russia’s south Urals region have stumbled upon a gruesome discovery — four barrels left in a forest containing 248 human fetuses, prompting an official probe, officials said Tuesday. Police in the Sverdlovsk region said the fetuses, preserved in formaldehyde, were kept in barrels with tags marked with surnames and numbers.

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A 17-year-old boy was arrested after police found him lying completely naked in the middle of a street while apparently high on LSD. Police said the boy also jumped on the hood of their patrol car and broke out the windshield with his fists.

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A former teacher with an apparent “food fetish” is accused of asking a female student to put a pie down his pants, BBC News reported. The man is also accused of having inappropriate video-chats with his students, in which he asked them to smear themselves in ketchup and eggs and to pour sour milk into their underwear.

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Yes, George Jefferson was a head. He wasn’t just a fan of prog music – he actually cut an album with YES founder Jon Anderson. Called Festival of Dreams, it has never been released. Hemsley was pretty evangelical about his prog obsessions. Besides dancing on Dinah! (if someone has that video, please share!), he wore a shirt for the band Nektar while doing press. And he pulled every string he could to hang out with Daevid Allen of the band Gong. Allen later gave an interview to Magnet Magazine where he talked about the bizarre experience of visiting the short TV star and discovering the guy had an acid lab in his basement (which means if you were taking acid in LA in the 70s it may well have been coming from George Jefferson himself)

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Addicts in prison go to extreme lengths to get their fix. But scoring the drugs isn’t the only obstacle they face—how to shoot them up? With no works available, a heroin user in jail needs a little ingenuity. The result of this ingenuity is a “binky.” But even though these can be manufactured, not every user has his own—shakedowns and a lack of materials make them scarce. Prisoners try not to share, but when it comes right down to it, they’re likely to overcome their reservations. “I usually don’t share needles,” says one prisoner. “But if there’s only one binky, and my homeboy got the chiva, you know I’m taking a hit. Why wouldn’t I? This is prison, fool, and I’m trying to get blasted. I’ll deal with all the rest later.” The “rest” includes widespread HIV and Hep. C. But here’s how you make a binky:

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An Arlington Vermont company called Cremation Solutions is creating custom made cremation urns in the shape of your loved ones head. Thats right, with just one or two pictures of the persons face, and by using state of the art 3D imaging techniques, the company will make a polymer compound likeness of your loved one’s head and mount it on a marble base. Excellent. I know you’re probably wondering, so yes, the heads will have hair, for folks that had very closely cropped hair, it can simply be digitally added to the head, or the company will gladly add a wig, per your specifications. Ashes are loaded from the bottom and a beautiful brass nameplate is affixed to the heads luxurious black marble base.

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Solar Effects From 1948 to 1997, the Institute of North Industrial Ecology Problems in Russia found that geomagnetic activity showed three seasonal peaks each of those years (March to May, in July, and in October). Every peak matched an increased incidence of anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and suicide in the city Kirovsk. One explanation for the correlation is that solar storms desynchronize our circadian rhythm (biological clock). The pineal gland in our brain is affected by the electromagnetic activity. This causes the gland to produce excess melatonin, and melatonin is the brain’s built in “downer” that helps us sleep. “The circadian regulatory system depends on repeated environmental cues to [synchronize] internal clocks,” says psychiatrist Kelly Posner, Columbia University. “Magnetic fields may be one of these environmental cues.”

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A MAN is recovering in hospital after four men broke into his flat and cut off his penis. Police are hunting the masked intruders, who are thought to have acted over accusations that their victim was engaged in affairs with local women. The 41-year-old told cops he had been asleep when the men burst into his bedroom around 4am. “They put something over my head and pulled down my trousers and then they ran off. I was so shocked I didn’t feel a thing – then I saw I was bleeding and my penis was gone,” he said. Although emergency workers searched for the severed organ, they failed to locate it and believe it was taken away by the attackers.

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Uh oh, Chik-Fil-A: Looks like your half-assed attempt to cover up the fact that the Muppets recently ended a partnership with you over your anti-gay views just hit a little roadblock called “anyone with a computer.” How does it feel to be outed? Sorry no one bought your airtight “kids are trying to finger their kids’ meal toys” defense (seen below), or your sassy new fictional tween spokeswoman. Maybe you should stick to what you’re best at: putting pickles on chicken sandwiches and alienating customers with your creepy religious views.

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Bazooka Joe has endured for almost 60 years now, but few know the name of the man who created him (and his original gang; Bazooka Joe’s gang has been revamped a couple of times). That man is Wesley Morse, and he was a pornographic cartoonist. Morse is one of the only known artists of the famous Tijuana Bibles. These 8 page porno comic strips were wildly popular in the 30s and 40s; some were dirty jokes illustrated, some were porn parodies of famous stars or cartoons and some were wholly original tales. The vast majority of Tijuana Bible creators were anonymous but Morse, who also did pin-up art, was a known figure in the field. His most famous Bibles were tied in to the New York World’s Fair of 1939; legend has it that Morse sold his books at the Fair itself (a risky proposition in those more strict days). It was his Tijuana Bible work that actually got Morse the Bazooka Joe job.

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Recreational use of the club drug Ecstasy could cause memory problems, new research finds. The research is the first study of Ecstasy users before they begin to use the drug regularly, which helps rule out alternative causes for the memory loss, said study leader Daniel Wagner, a psychologist at the University of Cologne in Germany. “By measuring the cognitive function of people with no history of Ecstasy use and, one year later, identifying those who had used Ecstasy at least 10 times and remeasuring their performance, we have been able to start isolating the precise cognitive effects of this drug,” Wagner told LiveScience.

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While there are still some details to sort out, it’s pretty clear that making weapons at home using 3-D printers from commonly available materials is going to become much more commonplace in the near future. In fact, as 3-D printing technology matures, materials feedstock improves, and designs for weapons proliferate, we might soon see the day when nearly everyone will be able to print the weapons of their choice in the numbers they desire, all within the privacy of their own homes.

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Talk about extreme couponing! Three women in Arizona were arrested recently for selling counterfeit coupons—a lot of counterfeit coupons. After an eight-week undercover investigation, police raided three homes in the Phoenix area, seized $40 million worth of bogus coupons, and arrested the women, who were enjoying a life of “opulence and the money was the equivalent of drug cartel-type of stuff,” according to the police.

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Walmart’s Bad Kerning

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The human voice is the most natural and the most nuanced form of communication. Introduce new technology like email, instant messaging and the telephone and people start behaving differently. They tell an astonishing number of lies per day… or per conversation. Here’s how it differs depending on what sort of media you are using. And there’s also some advice on what you can do ti keep it real!

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The owner Krsihan Kutti Nair who built the restaurant that’s spread out over a centuries old Muslim cemetery, doesn’t know who the patrons in the basement floor are, but claims their presence has been great for business. And he’s right. Business is brisk at the bustling restaurant where the graves are scattered erratically. The plan wasn’t to begin a restaurant right in the middle of a cemetery. In India, however, where death and life mix as smoothly as tandoori chicken and rum, and reincarnation theories are a permanent fixture of folklore and Bollywood movies, people aren’t as spooked by graveyards as Westerners are. Plus, in a country of a billion with space at a premium, graveyards are often used for commercial and even residential purposes. The constant flow of relatives, who visit graveyards to visit their dead kin, has meant that these macabre locations are actually great from a business point of view.

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Recreational drugs called bath salts, which have gained popularity recently and have been in the news for their bizarre effects on users, have the potential for abuse and addiction, similar to that of cocaine. Bath salts, which, despite their name, have no use in the tub, are different variations of the compound called cathinone, an alkaloid that comes from the khat plant. Currently, 42 U.S. states have laws banning many substituted cathinones. Mephedrone is one of the most common derivatives of cathinone and was listed federally in October 2011 on Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act for one year, pending further study. Then on July 9, 2012, President Barack Obama signed a law placing bath salts containing mephedrone or the stimulant MDPV onto the controlled substances list. The drugs can cause a laundry list of body and mind changes, including dizziness, delusions, paranoia, suicidal thoughts, seizures, nausea, vomiting and even death.

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In the first-ever nationwide crackdown on the synthetic drug industry, law enforcement officers arrested more than 90 people, seized $36 million in cash and more than 4.8 million packets of synthetic cannabinoids Wednesday, authorities said. Agents also confiscated material to make 13.6 million more packets and 167,000 packets of synthetic hallucinogens, more commonly known as bath salts. In addition, materials to make 392,000 more packets of bath salts were seized. Operation Log Jam, a joint effort between the Drug Enforcement Administration and federal and local agencies, was conducted in more than 90 cities spanning 30 states, DEA Administrator Michele M. Leonhart said at a news conference Thursday. She said the raids included 29 manufacturing facilities at every level of the industry, from small-scale operations to large warehouses.

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Paul Frampton, 68, said he thought that he was to meet Denise Milani, a Czech-born glamour model and former Miss Bikini World in a hotel, and was asked by a man in the lobby to look after a suitcase that he was told belonged to her. The suitcase contained 2kg of cocaine hidden in its lining. Dr Frampton now believes that a fraudster was posing as 32-year-old Miss Milani in an online chat room. The physicist, who has a double first from Brasenose College, Oxford, and has collaborated with winners of the Nobel Prize, was stopped from boarding a flight from Buenos Aires to Peru in January after customs officials found the cocaine. Since then he has been on remand in Argentina’s Villa Devoto jail and faces a 16-year sentence if convicted.

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Mangino pleaded guilty to sexually exploiting a 15-year-old girl who was in his custody in March 2011. He was child while still an Aurora Police officer for having sexually explicit pictures of the girl on his cell phone. Chief Deputy District Attorney J.P. Moore said during Thursday’s sentencing the March 2011 crime was not an isolated incident but rather a pattern of conduct. “Mangino took advantage of his position as a police officer…the violation of trust was beyond the victim, the violation also extended to the Aurora Police Department and the community,” he said. Aurora Police Chief Daniel J. Oates says, “Mr. Mangino, by his perverse and sexually deviant actions, did great harm to the image of the Aurora Police Department. He insulted and offended all the wonderful men and women of this agency.”

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Cops calculate the “street value.” It’s a branch of mathematics in which economies of scale meet public relations. By envisioning thousands of transactions that will never occur — and sometimes padding the numbers on top of that — law-enforcement agencies can wind up doubling, tripling, quadrupling, quintupling, sextupling or even septupling what the confiscated drugs are worth to the bulk-level dealers who got popped. In the hands of a narcotics cop with a calculator, $2 million of heroin can become $9 million, $500,000 worth of meth can become $2.5 million, coke worth less than $1 million can become several million.

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Woven into the fabric of the human body is an intricate system of proteins known as cannabinoid receptors that are specifically designed to process cannabinoids such as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), one of the primary active components of marijuana. And it turns out, based on the findings of several major scientific studies, that human breast milk naturally contains many of the same cannabinoids found in marijuana, which are actually extremely vital for proper human development. Cell membranes in the body are naturally equipped with these cannabinoid receptors which, when activated by cannabinoids and various other nutritive substances, protect cells against viruses, harmful bacteria, cancer, and other malignancies. And human breast milk is an abundant source of endocannabinoids, a specific type of neuromodulatory lipid that basically teaches a newborn child how to eat by stimulating the suckling process.

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A wealthy businessman – and husband of six – has died after allegedly being forced into a marathon sex session with his ‘jealous’ wives. Nigerian Uroko Onoja was having sex with the youngest of his spouses when the remaining five are reported to have set upon him with knives and sticks – and demanded that he have sex with each of them too. Mr Onoja went on to have intercourse with four of his wives in succession, but ‘stopped breathing’ as the fifth was making her way to the bed in Ogbadibo, according to Nigeria’s Daily Post. Two women have been arrested following the incident in the state of Benue last week, said the report, which used the term ‘raped to death’ to describe the businessman’s fate.

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A substance marketed as a natural stimulant in nutrition and sports supplements has proven to be entirely synthetic, investigators reported. Chemical analysis of 1,3-dimethylamylamine (DMAA) from supplements found it indistinguishable from two known synthetic versions of the compound. Purportedly derived from geranium plants, DMAA did not show up in analyses of extracts from eight different types of geranium.

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Fire officials said 21 people at an event hosted by motivational speaker Tony Robbins suffered burns while walking across hot coals and three of the injured were treated at hospitals. The injuries took place during the first day Thursday of a four-day event at the San Jose Convention Center hosted by Robbins called “Unleash the Power Within.” Most of those hurt had second and third degree burns, said San Jose Fire Department Capt. Reggie Williams. Walking across hot coals on lanes measuring 10 feet long and heated to between 1,200 to 2,000 degrees provides attendees an opportunity to “understand that there is absolutely nothing you can’t overcome,” according to the motivational speaker’s website.

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At the same time, one branch of that thinking has itself evolved into a new project: the notion of creating downloadable chemistry, with the ultimate aim of allowing people to “print” their own pharmaceuticals at home. Cronin’s latest TED talk asked the question: “Could we make a really cool universal chemistry set? Can we ‘app’ chemistry?” “Basically,” he tells me, in his office at the university, with half a grin, “what Apple did for music, I’d like to do for the discovery and distribution of prescription drugs.”

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Kacavas said Kwiatkowski engaged in “diversion,” an act in which a person injects a drug with a syringe and leaves behind another syringe filled with a substance such as saline. By doing a switch, rather than just taking the syringe, it becomes more difficult to detect drugs that have gone missing.

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The draw to see any DJ live usually stems from an affinity for their original productions, so their skills in the studio should be able to make up for the fact that they are going to just “hit play.” These guys get more music submissions than anyone on the planet; is it really that hard to find new material to play out? They spend countless hours on planes with their laptops and production tools at the ready; is it really that hard to put together a new mashup or bootleg before a set? I miss the days where I would say “Whoa, what is this?!” instead of “Ugh, this bootleg again?” As much as it sucks when Shazam can’t ID a track, it sucks even more when you know every single song being played. If the current trajectory of DJ sets continues, it won’t be long before everyone catches on to what’s really going on here. In the same way that mainstream radio stations have killed songs by playing them far too often, DJs are quickly doing the same.

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I think given about 1 hour of instruction, anyone with minimal knowledge of ableton and music tech in general could DO what im doing at a deadmau5 concert. Just like i think ANY DJ in the WORLD who can match a beat can do what “ANYONE else” (not going to mention any names) is doing on their EDM stages too.

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Traditionally, a DJ spun vinyl records on turntables and would change his set every night. So what about guys who play on laptops? Those who spend more time raising their hands than mixing? Or those whose presence is lost behind intricate light shows? Esteemed electronic producer deadmau5, who recently graced the cover of rock bible Rolling Stone wearing his namesake, robo-rodent mask, decided to blow the whistle himself with a refreshingly frank tumblr post entitled “We All Hit Play.” Explaining how his pre-planned stage show works, he admits that the term “live” is an overstatement. But his tone is strangely defensive and he unjustly lumps DJs into the argument, reducing their craft to mindless beat-matching: “I had that skill down when I was 3.”

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The library has been stung by complaints about the content, including explicit pornography, that some people watch in front of others. To address the issue, the library over the last six weeks has installed 18 computer monitors with plastic hoods so that only the person using the computer can see what is on the screen. “It’s for their privacy, and for ours,” said Michelle Jeffers, the library spokeswoman. The library will also soon post warnings on the screens of all its 240 computers to remind people to be sensitive to other patrons — a solution it prefers to filtering or censoring images. It is an issue playing out not just at libraries, but in cafes and gyms, on airplanes, trains and highways, and just about any other place where the explosion of computers, tablets and smartphones has given rise to a growing source of dispute: public displays of mature content.

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Just over a year ago, we broke the story of Silk Road, the underground online market that’s like an eBay for illegal drugs. It’s been thriving ever since. But as the summer drags on, Silk Road users are becoming increasingly paranoid over a series of unexplained disappearances. And the Drug Enforcement Agency has now revealed it’s investigating the site. Is Silk Road really as invincible as it seems? In early July, the DEA told the Austin TV news station KXAN that it was investigating Silk Road, where users openly buy and sell drugs, from heroin to ecstacy and pot. New York Senator Chuck Schumer had asked the DEA to look into the site after we first wrote about it about a year ago, but this is the first public acknowledgement that the DEA has heeded his call.

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The best part of waking up? Not exactly. County employees in Anaconda got an unexpected morning jolt last month after someone left urine and feces in their coffee pot at the courthouse. Police Chief Tim Barkell said the prank could land felony assault charges against the culprit, who both urinated into the can of coffee grounds and four days later smeared feces directly in the machine. Two county employees are being tested for hepatitis A after they unknowingly drank the coffee tainted with urine. Nobody else drank the coffee. Thanks Jasmine

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A species of termite found in the rainforests of French Guiana takes altruism seriously: aged workers grow sacks of toxic blue liquid that they explode onto their enemies in an act of suicidal self-sacrifice to help their colonies (see video). The “explosive backpacks” of Neocapritermes taracua, described in Science today1, grow throughout the lifetimes of the worker termites, filling with blue crystals secreted by a pair of glands on the insects’ abdomens. Older workers carry the largest and most toxic backpacks. Those individuals also, not coincidentally, are the least able to forage and tend for the colony: their mandibles become dull and worn as the termites age, because they cannot be sharpened by moulting.

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On June 2, 2009, an apartment superintendent in New Brunswick, N.J., stumbled upon what he thought was a terrorist hideout and called 911. It was really an NYPD operation to conduct surveillance well outside its jurisdiction

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A gardener who carved a giant bush into a hand displaying a rude gesture has been ordered to remove it after being accused of committing a public order offence. Richard Jackson has displayed the offending topiary, which shows the middle-finger sign, in his garden for the last eight years. The 53-year-old has now been told by the council to alter it after a neighbour complained, but he has refused to comply.

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Thanks Nico

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The Who announced on Wednesday that they’re playing at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center on Feb. 26 as part of their 2012-2013 North American tour. It’s their first Providence show since 1975; a scheduled 1979 show was canceled due to security concerns by then-Mayor Vincent A. Cianci in the wake of a fatal crowd stampede at a Who concert in Cincinnati. If you were headed for that cancelled show, you may finally make it. Dunk general manager Larry Lepore said on Thursday that anyone who still has a ticket for the 1979 Who Providence concert can trade it in for a free ticket to February’s show. The vintage ticket will be donated to charity, Lepore says: “It’s got to be worth something.”

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The FBI is consulting local police and vendors about technology currently in use that can spot crooks and terrorists by interpreting the symbolism of their tattoos, according to government documents. The inquiry follows work already underway at the bureau and Homeland Security Department to add iris and facial recognition services to their respective fingerprint databases. The FBI on Friday issued a request for information on existing databases “containing tattoo/symbol images, their possible meanings, gang affiliations, terrorist groups or other criminal organizations.” The mass collection of multiple biometric markers, potentially including vocal tracks and handwriting samples, has upset immigrant communities who say the FBI and DHS are misusing the technology to deport innocent people.

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All of the US has turned to Aurora, Colorado after a Friday morning shooting left more than a dozen movie-goers dead. But while the latest massacre has scarred millions of Americans, it’s also just another item added to a list of gruesome sprees. According to an ongoing tally kept by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the United States is experiencing an average of around 20 mass shootings each year. While Friday morning’s incident inside of a Aurora movie theater has perhaps the unfortunate distinction of being the most violent in recent memory — taking no fewer than 12 lives and injuring around 50 more — it is only yet only one example out of many that has marred society this year. The Aurora massacre is believed to be one of the worst incident on American soil since a rampage at Virginia Tech in 2007 left 32 people dead. The Fort Hood, Texas massacre two years later also ended with massive bloodshed, as well, with 13 people losing their lives in that event.

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An Oregon man who stripped nude at Portland’s airport security to protest what he saw as invasive measures was found not guilty of indecent exposure. Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge David Rees ruled Wednesday that John Brennan’s act was one of protest and therefore, protected speech. Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney Joel Petersen argued that Brennan’s strip-down was an act of indecent exposure. “I was aware of the irony of removing my clothes to protect my privacy,” Brennan said from the witness stand on Wednesday.

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The manager of the adult theater in Hollywood where actor-comedian Fred Willard was arrested said Los Angeles police have conducted checks there dozens of times since late 2011. Tiki Theater manager Kazi Jafor said that since November 2011, officers have been to the theater 40 times and made 23 arrests. Jafor said the theater displays in writing rules against lewd conduct. “If we see anybody in this activity, we try to stop them,” he said. He said three adult movies were showing on a continuous loop, including the “Client List” parody and “Follow Me 2.” Several people were in the theater when two uniformed vice officers conducted a spot check Wednesday night around 7:45 p.m. Jafor said he saw the officers talking to the 72-year-old actor before they placed him in handcuffs. “The police officers were telling him he did something wrong, he denied it,” Jafor said. According to the LAPD, Willard “engaged in a lewd act,” but police did not elaborate.

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A 9-year-old boy with a massive tumor was whisked from a dangerous neighborhood in Mexico in an armored vehicle by U.S. agents and taken across the border for treatment in New Mexico, his family said. The boy and his parents were snatched Thursday from the gang-infested neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez — one of the deadliest cities in the world — after members of a New Mexico Baptist church saw him near an orphanage and sought help. The parents of the child, identified by officials only as Jose to protect his family, said the tumor on his shoulder and neck has grown so large that it affects his eyesight and could move into his heart.

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Ellison says after learning she had not backed up her data on her home computer, the employee offered to buy the iPhone with a cracked screen she was replacing. She says he paid her $60 out of his own wallet, and promised to wipe clean her older iPhone after transferring the data to her new iPhone 4s. A day later, she realized her new iPhone 4s didn’t have any of her 900 photos, including suggestive personal photos and a video taken by her young children of themselves, joking after getting out of the shower. “I felt sick. I felt violated. I felt so embarrassed,” Ellison tells WTOP. Ellison called the Best Buy to complain, and asked a manager to call her. Instead, the Geek Squad employee called her, promising to retrieve her photos. “A few days later, he called back to tell me he’d made a CD at his house with all my photos, and when can I come get them. I could pick them up at his house,” Ellison said. Ellison hung up the phone.

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We know CFL bulbs are world-changingly efficient, producing the same level of light as their incandescent parents while using a quarter of the energy. But they’re still a relatively new device, and few long-term studies have been carried out on them. One of the most recent, a new report from a team at Stony Brook, suggests CFLs might cause damage to skin by releasing UV rays.

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A “blur all faces” option in YouTube’s video enhancement tool lets a user edit their video, creating a new copy with obscured faces. After that, you can preview what the video will look like, then delete the blurless original. (There’s still some bugs to be worked out in facial recognition, but the feature goes live today.)

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The 18-year ran a 40-hour marathon session with the game in Taiwan before then he was reported to have booked a room at his local Internet café before plunging into Diablo III and foe the entire 40-hours he neither slept or stopped or had anything to eat. He was checked on by an employee of the cafe and was found lifeless on a table Sunday but he immediately woke up as he notched but after moving a few steps he collapsed and was immediately rushed to the hospital and he was later pronounced dead at the hospital. Hospital authorities suspected that he probably suffered blood clots due the long period of sitting.

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Cheap, seemingly harmless and guaranteeing a night of raucous laughter, so-called ‘hippy crack’ is increasingly popular with celebrities and their well-heeled young fans alike. Even Prince Harry was seen indulging two years ago. There is just one problem: nitrous oxide is no more legal than it is innocuous. Despite being touted openly at music festivals and in bars and nightclubs across the country, sale of the gas for recreational use is very much against the law. As for being innocuous, that is only true if one ignores the alarming side-effects it can cause: strokes, hallucinations, seizures, blackouts, incontinence, stress on the heart, chronic depression and even — in cases of prolonged use — depleted bone marrow. Few would tack the word ‘harmless’ on to such a list.

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin is going to be joined by Barre Mayor Thomas Lauzon and police officials when he signs an emergency rule banning 83 new dangerous drugs commonly known as “bath salts.”

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The U.S. government confirmed that Bolivia has fewer coca plantations but it is producing more cocaine because drug traffickers are using a more “efficient” process known as the “Colombian method,” according to an interview published Sunday in the daily Pagina Siete.

My body is a place where drugs and alcohol have made germs afraid to live. I have no health problems to speak of, touch wood.

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“The narcotics and a shotgun were found hidden in a baby crib inside the residence,” Ruiz said in a statement. “Investigators believe the suspect in the case is involved with the distribution of narcotics to other drug dealers in the city of Burbank.”

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Oregon and two other states will no longer allow certain food stamp applicants to deduct medical marijuana expenses from their incomes after federal officials threatened the states with penalties. The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a nationwide memo to regional directors of the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, after The Oregonian contacted the agency about the practice last week. The newspaper surveyed 17 states that permit marijuana for medicinal use and found three – Oregon, New Mexico and Maine – allowed certain applicants to deduct the cost of the drug from their income when applying for the benefit.

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For about a year, the Warren County Drug Task Force had been investigating the trafficking of high-grade marijuana being sold to students at Mason and King Mills high schools, which they say they traced to the 17-year-old. When officials searched the boy’s house, they found more than $6,000 in cash in his bedroom at his parents’ house. As part of the investigation, task force members searched locations in Blue Ash, Norwood and Hamilton where they seized more than 600 hydroponic high grade marijuana plants . Officials with the Warren County Drug Task Force say the street value from the pot was $5,000 a pound. They seized thousands of dollars in grow equipment as well. Authorities valued the drug operation at more than $3 million and say they believe the 17-year-old was grossing more than $20,000 a month.

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“Since day one, President Obama has led the way in reforming our Nation’s drug policies by, among other things, addressing drug use and its consequences as a public health problem,” reads a statement posted on We the People, the petition site started by the, er, Obama administration. If you’ve been the victim of a federal raid—one in which, say, your two-year-old was yanked out if his crib—or worked at one of the 500 California medical pot dispensaries the DEA and the IRS have shut down in the last year, you’re probably rolling your eyes right now.

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That kind of winking and nudging is typical in the emergent genre of ads aimed at stoners, a once taboo marketing approach recently embraced most blatantly by the fast food industry. Just look at the actor in the next burger commercial you see. Odds are he’ll be a glassy-eyed Spicoli, dropping coded reefer references (see Jack in the Box’s favorite mumbling pothead). Companies as big as Taco Bell and General Mills have gotten in on the act and they’re reaping the rewards. Taco Bell, with its Doritos-taco hybrid and “late night munchies” tagline saw a six percent sales increase in the first quarter of 2012. General Mills, which revived Cheech and Chong for a Fiber One web campaign, deemed the ad so successful it plans to do more just like it. Then there’s Sonic and its hallucinating twenty-something dreaming of man-sized cheesy tots. Carl’s Jr. is touting its “wake and bake” habit. Denny’s is promoting a reggae-loving unicorn.

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The drug helps her keep focus on the giant statue of popsicle sticks she’s building with her kids and relaxes her so she can get through the rest of the night without stressing. “It can make folding a pile of laundry fun,” says Margaret, 45, who asked that we not use her last name for fear of getting in trouble with the law. “If I didn’t smoke, that’d be three piles later in the week.” Still, she doesn’t flaunt her marijuana use. Her sons aren’t allowed to go into the room where she keeps the drugs locked up, and she hides it from other moms who would keep their kids away if they knew she smoked pot. “Being judged for doing something nontoxic and totally organic, enjoying a god-given plant, by moms who suck back two bottles of Chardonnay like sports drinks feels like s—,” complains Margaret. “Any hypocrisy is hard to swallow. A drunk mother is pathetic and I often leave parties when I experience other mothers tying one on.”

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Australia’s peak drugs body says it is concerned by reports young Aboriginal people in central Australia are stealing deodorant from supermarkets to get high. An Alice Springs youth organisation says there is a deodorant sniffing outbreak in the town involving children as young as seven. The Alcohol and other Drugs Council of Australia’s David Templeman says it is a dangerous situation. “In some cases, it can include hallucinations and drowsiness and coma and that can then sometimes lead to death,” he said.

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Man allegedly DWI on a Wal-Mart scooter

Houma police say a 24-year-old man is accused of driving a shopping scooter while drunk. Police say Thomas J. Phillip’s breath tested at more than double the amount considered legal proof of intoxication under Louisiana law when he was pulled over Sunday. Police say they got a call about a motorized scooter pulling a wheelchair, and found Phillip on the scooter and a friend of his in the wheelchair. They say Phillip was arrested after allegedly telling police he’d been at a Wal-Mart store and decided to take the scooter for a joyride.

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In a sign that the Garden State’s budding medical marijuana program is finally moving forward, the first crop has been growing hydroponically for about a month in a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in an undisclosed location, officials said. The first plants are about a foot high, said Joseph Stevens, president of the Greenleaf Compassion Center, the first licensed provider of medical pot. By mid-September, the center’s Montclair dispensary should be open and accepting patients to buy marijuana, he said.

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New York lawmakers have proposed barring spending on alcohol, strip clubs, cruise ships and psychics. “It’s a slap in the face to people who are on public assistance and are trying to get off, when others abuse the system,” said state Sen. Thomas Libous, a Republican. Ann Valdez of Brooklyn’s Coney Island section said it’s “crazy” for the government to be dictating where people spend their assistance instead of creating living-wage jobs. She said she struggles just to cover toiletries, clothing and other expenses for herself and her 13-year-old son on the $120 she receives every two weeks. “I don’t know one person who uses their EBT money to buy liquor or anything like that,” Valdez said. Washington state lawmakers have prohibited purchases of tattoos, body piercings, alcohol and tobacco. Bars, bail bond agencies, gambling establishments and strip clubs are also now required to deactivate the ability of their ATMs to accept benefit cards.

Contrary to media presentations, it appears Eugene did not take bath salts, LSD, or cocaine. According to his girlfriend he frequently used marijuana but refused all other drugs. He even avoided medication for minor ailments like headaches. Two days before the attack Eugene and two friends had a Bible study where they discussed how to become better men according to the word of God. Eugene vowed to give up marijuana. It is more likely that this vow – not bath salts – precipitated the attack.

The young people’s meetings I went to all over Los Angeles featured a revolving cast of men that I would call perverts. They weren’t the obvious kind of creeps, either, with windowless white vans and long trench coats. They looked like everyone else at the meetings: tattooed and cool and smoking cigarettes. These men swarmed me, as they did every other newcomer too young and inexperienced to distinguish between the loving hand of AA and the clammy hand of a predator. They welcomed me to the meetings, they gave me over-long hugs, they offered me smokes when I was still too young to buy my own. I felt absolutely enveloped by the program. I had never had so many people pay attention to me in my life. But what I thought of as harmless flirting—and all flirting is harmless when you’re 17 and your curfew is 10 pm—these men rightly interpreted as vulnerability.

Another popular technique can be seen in an image of a “eight-legged” bison at Chauvet cave, which is actually two superimposed images in slightly different stances. Azéma and Rivère say they have found 53 figures in twelve different caves that use this technique to represent animals running, tossing their heads, or shaking their tails. An even more impressive example is the use of stone or bone disks with engravings of a sitting and standing animal on opposite sides, which may have served as a prehistoric version of the 19th century toy known as a thaumatrope. If a strand of animal tendon run through a hole in the center of the disk was twisted and then rapidly untwisted, it would make the disk spin so fast that the two images would merge into an animation of the animal changing position.

When people ask Hamilton Morris what he does, he tells them he works in science. “I don’t have any desire to explain myself,” he says. Which is a shame, because if he did, they’d get a much more outlandish answer. Morris is a 24-year-old psychonaut – that is to say, an explorer in the realm of psychoactive substances. Another way of putting this is that he takes drugs for a living. Resembling an even-more-attenuated member of the Horrors and talking in a distinctive, deep bass voice with long, drawled vowels that themselves sound narcotised, Morris travels the world in search of new highs. These adventures, which he undertakes with a mix of gonzo abandon and scholarly rigour, are chronicled in the vice.com video series Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia.

A DOZY drug dealer was caught out after taking pictures of himself wearing a crown made of £20 notes with a bag of drugs hanging from his mouth. Other images found on Ayub Hagos’ mobile phone included piles of cash, guns, knives and white powder. The 19-year-old was arrested after police found heroin and crack cocaine in the flat he was staying at in Oxford Road, Southsea. He denied having anything to do with the drugs but when police found the photographs on his phone Hagos realised the game was up and changed his plea. He was jailed for three-and-a-half years at Portsmouth Crown Court. His barrister Alexander Thompson said Hagos had been naive. ‘He took the photographs as bravado to make himself seem more important in front of his peers,’ he said. ‘It’s incredibly naive for a sophisticated drug dealer to have these sort of photographs on his phone.’

Matt, who last Sunday revealed to The Sun Jacko’s romance with fellow superstar Whitney Houston, told how the King of Pop hated his skin colour so much he almost BURNED off his willy with bleaching creams. And the chart-topper desperately tried to BED Pamela Anderson months before his death — after becoming obsessed with her fake breasts and plastic surgery. Matt revealed that Jacko: DESPISED Madonna so much he named one of his deadly pet snakes after her. POKED holes in a voodoo doll he made of Steven Spielberg after the singer became a Nazi sympathiser. FLEW into a rage when he was barred from buying the Speaker’s chair from the House of Commons to use as his “green throne”. HID a huge stash of porn.

In this small Mexican town that sends sex slaves to New York, little boys dream of growing up to be pimps. Gaudy gabled houses that rise above gated walls are proof of the profits to be made from funneling “delivery girls” to Roosevelt Ave. in Queens. An annual parade of pimps in plumed hats — wielding whips to settle business beefs — is evidence that cash and fear has conquered shame here. “Many kids aspire to be traffickers,” said Emilio Munoz Berruecos, who grew up in the next village and runs a local human rights center. “This is a phenomenon that goes back half a century.” The town of 10,000, about 80 miles from Mexico City, is Mexico’s undisputed cradle of sex trafficking, one end of a pipeline that leads directly to our city’s streets. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s New York field office arrested 32 sex traffickers last year; 26 of them were from Tenancingo.

City animal control officers were called to Winecoff’s home Sunday evening after the monkey escaped and bit three people in the nearby neighborhood before returning home, Welch said. Officers obtained a search warrant when no one answered the door and went inside, finding the monkey and noticing drug paraphernalia in the home, Welch said. Winecoff returned home as officers were searching the house. Obtaining a second search warrant to look for drugs, officers then discovered about 3 pounds of marijuana along with hashish, mushrooms and Ecstasy, Welch said.

It’s a tiny fraction of the 131,483 people who have received medical marijuana cards since Michigan’s voter-approved program started in 2009, according to a state website. The program is run by the Bureau of Health Professions in the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. Of the 44 minors with cards, 21 are 17 years old, 11 are 16 and five are 15. A 7-year-old and two 9-year-olds also have received the cards, the Detroit Free Press ( ) reported Sunday. Two others are 14 years old, and a 13-year-old and 11-year-old also hold the cards.

The same anesthetic that caused the overdose death of pop star Michael Jackson is now the drug of choice for executions in Missouri, causing a stir among critics who question how the state can guarantee a drug untested for lethal injection won’t cause pain and suffering for the condemned.

It is alleged a fight broke out between the two men after Mr Purvis approached his neighbour on behalf of everyone in the apartment block to ask him to stop vacuuming in the early hours of the morning. “He came out and he got me by my trousers and my jacket there, and he tipped me over onto my pot plant down there,” Mr Purvis told A Current Affair. Mr Purvis said the pot plant saved his life by breaking his fall.

However the teenager soon became hooked on tanning and has since spent $52,505 (£23,000) on salon treatments and fake tan products. But the blonde, who now lives in New Jersey, refuses to stop using sunbeds and relies on modelling work to fund her addiction. She said: ‘It’s definitely been worth spending all that money. I’m in the modelling industry so I have to look good all the time. ‘Some people spend way more than that on cigarettes, so I just look at tanning as my guilty pleasure. Mum did the right thing, she wanted me to be happy.’

April 18 to May 6, in a room in the old county seat of Huidong in Guangdong province, this reporter used 19 days to witness the last part of drug addict Wu Guilin’s life.

If, however, you’re concerned about things such as freedom, control and innovation, then the prospect of a world in which most people access the internet via smartphones and other cloud devices is a troubling one. Why? Because smartphones (and tablets) are tightly controlled, “tethered” appliances. You may think that you own your shiny new iPhone or iPad, for example. But in fact an invisible chain stretches from it all the way back to Apple’s corporate HQ in California. Nothing, but nothing, goes on your iDevice that hasn’t been approved by Apple. And even if you’re not an Apple fanboy and sport an Android-powered mobile device, there is still the problem that your access to the internet is regulated by a company – your mobile network provider – which is free not just to charge prohibitively for access but also to decide what you can access and what you can’t.

When you use the Internet, you entrust your online conversations, thoughts, experiences, locations, photos, and more to companies like Google, AT&T; and Facebook. But what happens when the government demands that these companies to hand over your private information? Will the company stand with you? Will it tell you that the government is looking for your data so that you can take steps to protect yourself?

The war on drugs has a new front, and so far it appears to be a losing one. Synthetic mimics of marijuana, dissociative drugs and stimulants — such as the “bath salts” allegedly consumed by Randy Eugene, the Florida man shot after a horrific face-eating assault — are growing in popularity and hard to control. Every time a compound is banned, overseas chemists synthesize a new version tweaked just enough to evade a law’s letter. It’s a giant game of chemical Whack-a-Mole. “Manufacturers turn these things around so quickly. One week you’ll have a product with compound X, the next week it’s compound Y,” said forensic toxicologist Kevin Shanks of AIT Laboratories, an Indiana-based chemical testing company. “It’s fascinating how fast it can occur, and it’s fascinating to see the minute changes in chemical structure they’ll come up with. It’s similar, but it’s different,” Shanks continued. During the last several years, the market for legal highs has exploded in North America and Europe

Some area law enforcement officials apparently know who is installing the mysterious camera boxes on utility poles around St. Lawrence County, but they’re not saying who it is. The boxes, with a window for cameras to peer out of, have popped up in Norwood, Raymondville, DeKalb Junction, Waddington, Massena and Canton, according to witnesses. Law enforcement officials at local, state and federal agencies agree the boxes contain license plate readers that take snapshots, and are not video cameras that send live feeds. But none of them are willing to identify what agency the cameras belong to and who is operating them.

That New Mexico managed to find $22 million to subsidize a major motion picture should raise some eyebrows, considering that, in the last few years, it has cut funding for services for the elderly and the disabled, preschool, higher education, and its state workforce. “We could have spent that $22 million on all kinds of things, like education for our children. We could have spent it on roads,” said New Mexico state Rep. Dennis Kintigh (R). New Mexico is far from the only state providing subsidies for film and television production. In 2010, 43 states spent $1.5 billion on film and TV subsidies. Of the nine films that were nominated for best picture in 2012, five received state subsidies, including The Help, Moneyball and The Descendents.

The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich “consuming” countries – principally across Europe and in the US – rather than war-torn “producing” nations such as Colombia and Mexico, new research has revealed. And its authors claim that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go after western banks in pursuit of the massive amount of drug money being laundered through their systems. The most far-reaching and detailed analysis to date of the drug economy in any country – in this case, Colombia – shows that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries.

Chuck E. Cheese, a chain of pizzerias and arcade play spaces often used to host kids birthday parties, has become a hot spot for violent brawls between the adults. Multiple fights have broken out at locations across the country, many captured on cell phone videos then posted on YouTube. These incidents have shined an unusual spotlight on this family-friendly restaurant chain that has been around since 1977. One Chuck E. Cheese location in Susquehanna, Pa., has had a lot of problems. According to Police Chief Robert Martin, local authorities have been called to that location 17 times over the course of 18 months, starting in 2009. Thanks Billoney

Abobo’s Big Adventure is a project that we have been working on for YEARS as a true labor of lovewith one goal in mind: To create the ultimate tribute to the NES! This gargantuan 8-bit parody game is made for the fans by the fans, and now you finally have the chance to control the angriest character in the known universe – Abobo!

The Freaky Friday star has apparently had a ‘major crush’ on the professional for a long time, and no doubt couldn’t wait to get in front of his camera. ‘Lindsay has been texting and phoning him nonstop and he’s actually kind of freaked out by how strong she’s been coming on to him,’ the source added. ‘It’s a difficult situation though as they move in the same circles and have a lot of mutual friends. He’s trying to work out a way to let her down gently without blowing their friendship.’

In 1998, “Jodi,” a Wisconsin woman, met a man in an Internet chat room who went by the moniker, GMYourGod. Jodi was about to embark on a long, sordid journey that would end in the U.S. Supreme Court; her dramatic and salacious case would be one of the weirdest the Supreme Court has ever seen. The chatroom was dedicated to sadomasochism, and GMYourGod, in reality one Glenn Marcus, would soon become her “master.” Jodi had dabbled in two prior sadomasochist relationships before she met Marcus, but Marcus operated on an entirely different level. Marcus had a reputation as a hardcore master. For one thing, he didn’t use safe words—something the mainstream bondage, dominance and sadomasochistic (BDSM) community generally uses. In a dominant-submissive relationship, safe words are a code for an activity—flogging, for example—to stop. They are the primary means by which the submissive partner could communicate that the activity was no longer consensual. Thanks Jasmine

A former sex slave turned the tables on her tormentor in a Brooklyn court Monday, delivering a verbal lashing before a judge sentenced him to eight years in prison. “I walk around and carry the physical scars of the torture you put me through. The cigarette burns, the knife carvings, the piercings,” the woman, referred to in court simply as Jodi, told Glenn Marcus. “How a human being can see humor in the torture, manipulation and brainwashing of another human being is beyond comprehension. You have given me a life sentence.” Marcus, 58, had appealed his sex trafficking and forced labor conviction all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sent the case back to Brooklyn for resentencing. Facing more than 20 years for torturing Jodi after she tried to break off their master-slave relationship, Marcus asked for a nonjail sentence so he could care for his elderly mother in their suburban Long Island home.

Frustrated with fellow bus riders incessantly talking on their cell phones, a Philadelphia man began jamming the cell reception to silence their conversations. The NBC10 Investigators tracked down the cell phone zapper who targets talkers on a SEPTA bus route. Not only does he admit doing it, he thinks it’s a good thing. The man, who calls himself Eric, told the NBC10 Investigators, “I guess I’m taking the law into my own hands and quite frankly, I’m proud of it.” Eric says he doesn’t want to hear people talking on their cell phones in public. “It’s still pretty irritating and quite frankly it’s pretty rude,” said Eric. Eric says he’s firing up a cell phone jammer that he bought online to shut down conversations he doesn’t want to hear. “A lot of people are extremely loud, no sense of just privacy or anything, when it becomes a bother, that’s when I screw on the antenna and flip the switch,” said Eric.

According to a 2003 study by German and American scientists, a component of the Lily of the Valley scent known as Bourgeonal alters the calcium balance of human sperm and attracts the sperm. The “Lily of the Valley phenomenon” — also the title of a book about smelling — was born as a result of this discovery that sperm act as swimming olfactory cells which follow a “scent trail” laid by the egg. However, a detailed explanation for the Lily of the Valley phenomenon remained illusive as neither Bourgeonal nor other scents could be identified in the female sex organ. Scientists from the caesar research centre in Bonn, an Institute of the Max Planck Society, have now discovered that sperm do not function like olfactory cells — a finding that casts doubt on the assumption that scents play a role in fertilisation.

Richmore Mashinga Jazi, a self-employed carpenter, was watching live coverage of Mugabe’s birthday bash last Friday while drinking with friends when he allegedly suggested that the 88-year-old president had sought help to blow up the balloons. “Ko ndiani abatsira kufuridzira Mugabe zvibharuma zvebirthday rake, uye achiri nesimba racho here? (Who helped Mugabe blow up his birthday balloons, does he still have the energy?) is the statement that got Mugabe’s loyalists mad, resulting in the arrest of Jazi.

Every major website tracks its users as they make their way through the site, but in an analysis completed by the privacy company, Abine, one major website stands out for the number and variety of tracking methods used on its site: The Drudge Report. That’s a surprising finding given that the site’s appearance hasn’t changed in a decade. In a recent salutary profile, The New York Times’ David Carr noted the site had “no video, no search optimization, no slide shows, and a design that is right out of a mid-’90s manual on HTML.” But don’t be fooled by Drudge’s surface simplicity: When you the visit, up to 27 different tracking technologies from 18 separate companies are deployed. Drudge is like a 1995 Ford Escort with a 500-horsepower advertising engine under the hood. Drudge uses twice the number of advertising tools as the average site, according to Abine. And Drudge stands out even among news sites, which Abine CTO Andrew Sudbury said deploy “a high number of tracking technologies.”

“I just f—— killed someone. I strangled them and slit their throat and stabbed them now they’re dead. I don’t know how to feel atm. It was ahmazing. As soon as you get over the “ohmygawd I can’t do this” feeling, it’s pretty enjoyable. I’m kinda nervous and shaky though right now. Kay, I gotta go to church now…lol.” Thanks Jasmine

But when it had one of its surges of brilliance, MAD was indeed a force to be reckoned with and if you were of the right age at the right time it was both eye opening and fucking hilarious, a good case in point being the hit-or-miss observations and social commentary found in the long-running “(FILL IN THE BLANK) OF THE YEAR” series. Two of those stand out in my memory as being absolutely vital in the forging of my sense of humor were “Mad’s Karate Movie Producer of the Year” (MAD #167, June 1974), a piss-your-pants moment of brilliance illustrated by Jack Davis during the height of the 1970’s martial arts movie boom, and issue #199’s (June 1978) poke at the British punk rock movement when it reared its Mohawked head over here in the States.

✦ Know your Rights!- right!?

Recently as I was doing some research I came across a designers site that had a rug for sale that had the exact style of my friend Keen One, I thought to myself how unlikely that he would do such a commercial project so I passed the link for confirmation. As it turned out it wasn’t an agreed upon collaboration but an artistic infringement by the designer. Since the work was painted on a wall in public they must have assumed the artist had no rights to said work since it may or may not have been legal and decided to use for their own commercial and financial gain.

What would the trunk of a tree sound like if a cross section of it were played like an LP? With his creation Years, Bartholomäus Traubeck attempts to answer that question by using a turntable, PlayStation Eye Camera, a stepper motor to control the arm, and computer running Ableton Live. As you’ll hear in the video above, the rings of the tree trunk, as interpreted by this piece, create an eerie and ominous piano track that sounds like it was taken from psychological horror film. Who knew trees were so emo?

Revok recently pulled Fab 5 Freddy’s card calling him a biter and a fraud (check Revok’s blog post HERE). This accusation has drew a line in the sand with people opposing and supporting Fred’s work. Today I received this harshly retarded email from Holland’s Shoe aka Niels Shoe Meulman…

The Amazon is home to more species than almost anywhere else on earth. One of them, carried home recently by a group from Yale University, appears to be quite happy eating plastic in airless landfills. The group of students, part of Yale’s annual Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory with molecular biochemistry professor Scott Strobel, ventured to the jungles of Ecuador. The mission was to allow “students to experience the scientific inquiry process in a comprehensive and creative way.” The group searched for plants, and then cultured the microorganisms within the plant tissue. As it turns out, they brought back a fungus new to science with a voracious appetite for a global waste problem: polyurethane.

The amulet and mask were a 13-year-old boy’s virtual possessions in an online fantasy game. In the real world, he was beaten and threaten with a knife to give them up. The Dutch Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the theft conviction of a youth who stole another boy’s possessions in the popular online fantasy game RuneScape. Judges ordered the offender to perform 144 hours of community service. Only a handful of such cases have been heard in the world, and they have reached varying conclusions about the legal status of “virtual goods” — and whether stealing them is real-world theft. The suspect’s lawyer had argued the amulet and mask “were neither tangible nor material and, unlike for example electricity, had no economic value.”

The Earth is alive, asserts a new scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects — for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA — are animate, that is, alive.

Two doctors Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier from the Texas Heart Institute successfully replaced a dying man’s heart with a device—proving that it is possible for your body to be kept alive without a heart, or a pulse.

TWO pals were barred from entering the US after innocent tweets joking about “destroying America” were picked up by the country’s anti-terror cops. US special agents monitoring Twitter spotted Leigh Van Bryan’s messages weeks before he left for a holiday in Los Angeles with pal Emily Bunting. Leigh, who also quipped about “digging up Marilyn Monroe” on Twitter, said they were treated like terrorists on arrival at a Los Angeles International Airport. The pair were held by armed guards and quizzed for five hours before being handcuffed, put in a van with illegal immigrants and locked up overnight.

VeriSign Inc, the company in charge of delivering people safely to more than half the world’s websites, has been hacked repeatedly by outsiders who stole undisclosed information from the leading Internet infrastructure company. The previously unreported breaches occurred in 2010 at the Reston, Virginia-based company, which is ultimately responsible for the integrity of Web addresses ending in .com, .net and .gov.

Experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics. Special thanks to Professor Daniel Lee for his support.

Two men are behind bars after authorities found more than a ton of marijuana inside a fake AT&T; work truck. It all happened off FM 490 just west of the Hidalgo County community of McCook. A Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) state trooper pulled over what appeared to be an AT&T; truck over for speeding 72 mph in a 60 mph zone. Driver Aaron Arrellano-Salgado fled on foot but was caught. Authorities found 189 bundles with 2,168 pounds of marijuana inside the cloned work truck. State troopers pulled over a second car driven by Wilfredo Garza-Salgado for running a stop sign nearby.

The Oriental riff, also known as the Asian riff or the Chinese riff, is a musical riff or phrase that has often been used as a trope or stereotype of orientalism in Western culture to represent the idea of the Orient, China, Japan or a generic East Asian theme by Western culture. The riff is sometimes accompanied by the sound of a gong.

Police raided a five-story Bronx building that they believe was being used as a marijuana farm with hundreds of plants in an elaborate growing system. A search warrant was executed at about 1 p.m. Tuesday at 610 Morris Park Ave., according to police. Investigators seized 593 plants, some as tall as seven feet, as well as 75 pounds of marijuana that had been cut, dried and packaged in plastic. Sources told NBC New York that each floor of the building was used for a different stage of growth for the plants. It had been outfitted with an intricate ventilation and hydration system. The seized plants and packages totaled about 1,550 pounds, police said. Investigators said about 50 to 60 pounds of marijuana were being produced each month for a value of about $250,000.

Joan Rivers is not known as a shrinking violet. But the 78-year-old has taken things a step further by smoking a marijuana pipe in a carpark with her friend – and had it all filmed for her reality show. The comedian, known for her red carpet interviews at award shows, became so stoned, she was unable to drive home and later ended up fully clothed in a hot tub and drinking the water out of her shoe.

Mobile phones have become a major part of our modern civilization. These hand-held computers have reached a level of sophistication that allows us to instantly communicate through text, voice and video. This same technology is also being used to amass a situational awareness and sensory system that will track you and the world around you. You and your cell phone are nodes in a grid of sensors that paints a virtual picture of the world.

The size of the US government’s secret list of suspected terrorists who are banned from flying to or within the country has more than doubled in the past year. The no-fly list jumped from about 10,000 known or suspected terrorists one year ago to about 21,000, according to government figures. About 500 are US nationals. The flood of new names began after the failed Christmas 2009 bombing of a Detroit-bound jetliner when the US government lowered the standard for putting people on the list and scoured its files for anyone who qualified. “We learned a lot about the watchlisting process and made strong improvements, which continue to this day,” said Timothy Healy, director of the Terrorist Screening Centre, which produces the no-fly list.

Ever since she was a toddler, Stacey Irvine has eaten little else but chicken nuggets and the occasional portion of chips. Now, at the age of 17, she has been warned by doctors to change her appalling diet or die. The factory worker – who says she has never tasted fresh fruit or vegetables – had to be taken to hospital earlier this week when she collapsed after struggling to breathe.

When it comes to addiction, sex matters. A new brain imaging study by Yale School of Medicine researchers suggests stress robustly activates areas of the brain associated with craving in cocaine-dependent women, while drug cues activate similar brain regions in cocaine-dependent men. The study, expected to be published online Jan. 31 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, suggests men and women with cocaine dependence might benefit more from different treatment options.

The Pentagon doesn’t know what happened to more than $100 million in cash held at Saddam Hussein’s palace in Baghdad during the Iraq war, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. What’s more, the Pentagon can’t find documents to explain what it spent as much as $1.7 billion on from funds held on behalf of the Iraqi government by the New York Federal Reserve, the report says. The missing records raise new questions about how the US government handled billions of dollars in Iraqi funds during the war. The new report, the latest in a multi-year investigation by the inspector general into missing money in Iraq, paints a picture of Pentagon officials digging through boxes of hard copy records looking for missing paper copies of Excel spreadsheets, monthly reports and other paper documents that should have been kept detailing what the money was spent on and why those expenditures were necessary. Apparently, there are no electronic records

Bags containing 16 kilogram of cocaine that Mexican drug traffickers recently lost has turned up in an unlikely place – the United Nations in New York. Two fake UN bags containing the drugs – which experts said had a street value of about $US2 million ($1.9 million) – set off a security alert when they were delivered, apparently by accident, to the global body’s headquarters. The bags, which had the UN symbol printed on them, were shipped from Mexico through the DHL delivery company’s centre in Cincinnati, Ohio, deputy commissioner Paul Browne of the New York Police Department said. But the bags had no address on them, nor any return to sender details. “It is my understanding that because there was no addressee, the DHL just thought, well, that’s the UN symbol so we should ship it on to UN headquarters and let them figure out who it was supposed to go to,” deputy commissioner Browne said.

With Martin’s system, each crewmember gets a cell phone that operates using a prepaid SIM card; they also get a two-week plastic pill organizer filled with 14 SIM cards where the pills should be. Each SIM card, loaded with $50 worth of airtime, is attached to a different phone number and stores all contacts, text messages and call histories associated with that number, like a removable hard drive. This makes a new SIM card effectively a new phone. Every morning, each crewmember swaps out his phone’s card for the card in next day’s compartment in the pill organizers. After all 14 cards are used, they start over at the first one.

A US university student discovered a package of cocaine in a pre-owned textbook she bought from online retailer Amazon.com. Sophia Stockton, a junior at Mid-America Nazarene University in Olathe, Kansas, ordered a textbook called Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives and Issues through Amazon.com for a spring course on terrorism. After flipping through the pages of the just received textbook a bag of ‘white powder’ fell to the ground. Stockton initially thought that it was Anthrax and took the book and bag to the Gardner police station after classes and was surprised she had been shipped $400 worth of cocaine. She told WPTV: I told them white powder was in my terrorism textbook and so I put it on the table and they’re like, ‘oh, okay,’ And so he went back and tested it, He comes back and says, ‘you didn’t happen to order some cocaine with your textbook, did you?’ And I was like, no!

The new ‘rave drug’ is called Roflcoptr, which is a street-speak acronym for “Roll On the Floor Laughing Crapping Our Pants Totally Ruined”. An alternative name is “mket” (which is a truncation of the full chemical name, as described below). Like other drugs linked to electronica and other forms of club / dance music, the physiological affect is to produce a state of euphoria and sometimes have hallucinogenic properties. The basis of the new substance is the chemical methoxetamine (and which has a very long chemical name: 2-(3-methoxyphenyl)-2-(ethylamino)cyclohexanone). The chemical takes the form of a white powder. The user snorts the powder.

The hypocrisy of the war on drugs is outrageous when compared to the amount of drug trafficking that benefits the CIA and international banking system. The son of a convicted notorious mobster, John Gotti Jr, when asked in court if the family still dealt drugs cracked, “No, we can’t compete with the government.” Today in Afghanistan, American troops have been seen guarding poppy fields used to make heroin. Those fields were all but wiped out by 2001 when the Taliban destroyed them and forbade that agricultural pursuit. Now they’re flourishing again after the American occupation. This doesn’t make sense despite all the mainstream reports that American troops are protecting the poppy farmers from the bad guys. Internet sites such as Prison Planet, Info Wars, The Political Coffeehouse and others report otherwise. They connect the CIA and US military to restarting the poppy fields in Afghanistan in 2002, increasing poppy growth by over 650 percent. Who’s telling it like it is?

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel said Tuesday it has recommended disciplinary action against three Air Force officials after concluding they retaliated against four civilian mortuary workers at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for disclosing that remains of fallen troops had been mishandled.

Tania Ouaknine is convinced the police are watching her. She’s not paranoid — it says as much on the red sign painted along the side on the hulking armored truck that’s been parked in front of her eight-room Parisian Motel for several days. “Warning: You are under video surveillance,” reads the bold message on the side of the truck. From the front bumper of the menacing vehicle, another sign taunts: “Whatcha gonna do when we come for you?” The truck is a new weapon for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department in the fight against drugs and neighborhood nuisances, and it looks like a Winnebago on steroids. They call it “The Peacemaker,” and it may be a first in South Florida.

“In the event that Mr. Zuckerberg controls our company at the time of his death, control may be transferred to a person or entity that he designates as his successor. As a board member and officer, Mr. Zuckerberg owes a fiduciary duty to our stockholders and must act in good faith in a manner he reasonably believes to be in the best interests of our stockholders.”

Investigators recovered photos from the film processing store and Mark Berndt’s home that allegedly showed the students bound and blindfolded and some with large Madagascar cockroaches crawling on them inside the school setting, Scott said. Scott said girls were allegedly photographed with a blue spoon holding a white substance near their mouths. Investigators said they believe that substance was Berndt’s semen and that he had the girls consume it. Thanks Jasmine

Collection of strange Google Street View screenshots

Howard Gribble: When these photographs of Chicano “placas” (wall writing) were made in the early 1970s gangs and their graffiti were a mysterious presence that few understood — if they were aware of them at all. In the thirty plus years since the popular media and entertainment industry have repeatedly spotlighted the subject to the point that the gangsta culture has become a pervasive part of our society. The original gangster graffiti of this period was of a purer form than that seen today, with much emphasis on artistic flourishes. These pieces could last for years in the days before municipilaties instituted aggresive graffiti removal programs that quickly remove them from view — often overnight. This is, of course, still vandalism but from an earlier and more innocent time.